Sunday, May 11, 2014

Don't Believe Your Own Propaganda

The level and tone of propaganda coming out of Russia today
vastly exceed anything I recall from the Soviet Union. A quick look at the
absurd tweets from Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (@MFA_Russia)
and the
bullying by Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin (@DRogozin) should convince anyone. They
are far from alone; RT (formerly Russia Today) is going hot and heavy. And no,
I don’t think I’ll link to it.

Ukraine and EU, NATO, US, and European representatives, are
slanting their communications to present themselves in the best light. But
there is a qualitative and quantitative difference in what Russia is doing. Timothy
Snyder (I have bolded the bottom-line purposes of propaganda):

In view of its patent absurdity,
why is this propaganda so important to Putin’s regime? Most obviously,
propaganda serves the technical purpose of preparing
the way for war. An excellent propaganda apparatus, such as the Russian
one, can find ways to repeat its message over and over again in slightly
different ways and formats. Plenty of people in the West now spread Russian
propaganda, sometimes for money, sometimes from ignorance, and sometimes for
reasons best known to themselves. Those who repeat the Russian propaganda
conceits do not need to convince everyone, only to set the terms of debate. If people in free societies have their
discussions framed for them by rulers of unfree societies, then they will not
notice the history unfolding around them (a revolution just happened in
Europe!) or sense the urgency of formulating policy in a desperate situation (a
European country has just invaded another!). Propaganda can serve this
technical purpose no matter how absurd it is.

But propaganda has a deeper and
more important function. Propaganda, at least in the old Soviet Union, was not an edited version of reality, but
rather a crucial part of the endeavor to create a different reality. When
we refute propaganda with facts and arguments, and even when we discuss its
social function, we are inhabiting a certain mental world; we accept the
constraints of observation and reason at the outset and seek to change our
situation on the basis of what we think we can see and understand. But this is
not the only possible psychic reality. In the Soviet Union, the assumption
among many who believed in the promise of communism was that the future was as
real if not more real than the present. Soviet propaganda was not a version of
the world in which we live but rather a representation of the world to come.
When we see Russia’s current propaganda in this way, we understand why its
authors are utterly untroubled by what might appear to be factual errors and
contradictions.

Vladimir Putin’s methods in Ukraine are confusion and
evasion, valuable tools in propaganda’s kit. We do and do not know what his
actions are. One one level, of course Russia is contributing to Ukraine’s
destabilization. When Crimea was invaded and forced into a referendum, the
soldiers were Russian, as were the posters and balloting materials. Russia has 45,000
troops stationed outside Ukraine’s eastern border. And the armed men showed up
in Donetsk and other eastern Ukrainian cities only after the operation in
Crimea was completed.

On another level, the use of unmarked soldiers in Crimea and
local people in eastern Ukraine give pause to those who want, in good will, to
understand the situation, even as the pattern repeats itself.

Then there are Putin’s words and actions. Denial of Russian
soldiers in Crimea. Promises to pull troops back that are not met. Medals
awarded for meritorious service in Crimea. And don’t
believe your lying eyes… The constant drumbeat from Russia that the
government in Kiev is Nazi, that the EU and NATO are conspiring to destabilize
Russia, that Russia’s history demands the Crimea and even Kiev back, that
Russian speakers must be protected.

In this context, we appeal too, to
representatives of southeast Ukraine and supporters of federalisation to hold
off the referendum scheduled for May 11, in order to give this dialogue the
conditions it needs to have a chance.

Let me stress that the presidential
election the Kiev authorities plan to hold is a step in the right direction,
but it will not solve anything unless all of Ukraine’s people first understand
how their rights will be guaranteed once the election has taken place.

“This context,” earlier in the linked statement, was calling
the government in Kiev illegal, calling for its operations in eastern Ukraine
to end, and claiming that it holds political prisoners. As Snyder said, setting
the terms of debate.

The word “appeals” suggests that Putin has no direct
relationship with the “representatives” – a word that might be used for an
elected government. And those “representatives” have
decided to go forward with their referendum anyway. So Putin can say he
tried, and we can speculate how much control he actually has over those
“representatives.” But he can also claim a victory if the vote goes his way.
His support for the May 25 presidential election is highly qualified and vague.

Putin also said in the same statement

As for whether proposed measures
suit Russia or not, we are not a party to this conflict; the parties to the
conflict are in Ukraine itself. We were told repeatedly that our forces by the
Ukrainian border were a source of concern. We
have withdrawn our forces and they are now not on the Ukrainian border but are
carrying out their regular exercises at the test grounds. This can be
easily verified using modern intelligence techniques, including from space,
where everything can be seen. We helped to secure the OSCE military observers’
release and I think also made a contribution to defusing the situation.

The bolded sentence is the one that reporters picked up to
mean that the 45,000 Russian forces near Ukraine were being withdrawn. But they
didn’t bother to find out what Putin considers the “test grounds” to be. So the
sentence may be technically accurate, although Russian statements don’t always
bother with that. The observed fact is that there
has been no movement of those Russian forces. But the news as reported gave
a bit of credibility to Putin as peacemaker, allowing him to set the terms of
discussion. Repetition of the propaganda provides a cumulative effect.

Putin’s words have elements of all those possibilities. But
there is no reason to assume a simple correlation between what he says and what
he believes. Like any other leader, he says things to rally his people and
confuse his opponents. And he says those things in the context that Timothy
Snyder describes,

Propaganda, at least in the old
Soviet Union, was not an edited version of reality, but rather a crucial part
of the endeavor to create a different reality.

How far along does Putin believe that reality to be? The public
statements, the repetition, all leave their mark on Putin’s thinking. It’s very
difficult to say something over and over again and not begin to believe it.
Putin is also reported to be narrowing down the number of his advisors, narrowing
the range of discussion that he hears. Further, Russian/Soviet rulers have tended
to dismiss events outside Russia as trivial or unreal. Mikhail Gorbachev dismissed
the independence movements in the Baltic States until it was too late. Tsar
Nicholas II could not believe that events outside his Moscow circle were
relevant.

Is annexation consistent
with a customs union?

Putin has put a lot of work and prestige into his plans for
a Eurasian Union to compete with the European Union. The project is clearly
important to him. Ukraine, with its industry, would be an essential part of the
Eurasian Union. Last fall, negotiations were underway with Victor Yanukovych to
join; the cause of the demonstrations in Kiev was Yanukovych’s turning down an
association agreement with the EU to keep alive the possibility of joining
Putin’s Eurasian Union. The demonstrators preferred the EU.

Invading a country and annexing part of it is not a good way
to win friends in that country. Generally, an outside threat pulls a country
together in opposition to that threat. Nonetheless, Putin took Crimea from
Ukraine, the essential country for his Eurasian Union. What was he thinking?

A Russian friend explained to me that it was a peaceful
invasion, that it was a favor to Ukraine to show that a strong neighbor will
peacefully help Ukraine to overcome its divisions. Consider that Putin may have
believed that, along with what he has been saying about protecting his
Russian-speaking comrades. The ease of annexing Crimea would have reinforced
those beliefs.

The next step, then, would be to supply just enough pressure
to encourage the comrades in eastern Ukraine to join Russia, or at least split
from Kiev. Hence the troops on the Russian side of the border and the protests
clearly engineered by Russia.

It’s not possible, financially and logistically, to keep war-ready
troops in place for long periods of time. The troops (45,000 seems to be the
number I am seeing most commonly) are
not enough to invade, and certainly not enough to occupy a country the size
of Ukraine if there is resistance. Putin must have thought that his goal would
be achieved fairly quickly. If the goal was to destabilize Ukraine in
preparation for the presidential election, that’s probably not too long to keep
the troops in place. But what then?

Has Putin misjudged
the eastern Ukrainians?

Putin’s goal is more likely a federal constitution for
Ukraine, which will require more time unless the EU and US agree to negotiate
with him, relegating Ukraine to a minor role in the decisions. This would be an
implicit acceptance of Putin’s claim that Russia must have a sphere of
influence of buffer countries with no independence.

Very little of this seems to be happening. The people taking
over government buildings in cities of eastern Ukraine are a
varied group, with varied aims, most of which do not have to do with
joining Russia. Last week’s
incident in Odessa has not received the full propaganda treatment from
Russia, seemingly already forgotten, probably indicating that that was not part
of Russia’s plan.

The US and EU have not accepted Putin’s frame of great
powers deciding the fate of lesser powers and have not agreed to negotiate
Ukraine’s fate with him. There is no indication that they will; such action
would reverse too many of the understandings and agreements that brought peace
to Europe after World War II.

Putin has also had some difficulty with his comrades in the
Eurasian Union and the Collective
Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). Belarus initially was cool to the
Crimean annexation, although president Alexander Lukashenka now
is willing to “coordinate with Russia on Ukraine,” which is not yet a
ringing endorsement. President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan stayed
in Almaty to confer with US Deputy Secretary of State William Burns instead
of attending a CSTO meeting.

Perhaps Putin has misjudged the feelings of people in other parts of Russia on other issues, too.

Putin seems to have misjudged the situation in eastern
Ukraine and the response of other governments. The cash flow out of Moscow isn’t
slowing down, and the IMF says that Russia is now in recession.
Agitation in Ukraine can go only so far; it is hard to believe that Russia
wants a civil war on its doorstep. Nor would a civil war or an invasion strengthen
Putin’s Eurasian Union. Although it is clear that
the outcome of this weekend’s election will be overwhelmingly for secession
from Kiev, the practicaloutcome
could be ugly.

It is hard to see an end-game that gains Russia much. Putin
may have been misled by his own propaganda.